John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World
Jason Louv
Inner Traditions, 2018

Review by Barbara Ardinger.

Let’s begin with a spoiler. Although many Neopagans are interested in occultism and the work of the 16th-century astrologer John Dee, it’s important to keep in mind that Dee was nothing close to pagan. He and Kelly spoke to and were visited by angels and demons (or hallucinations), not classical gods or goddesses. Enochian magick and visits by angels and demons are concepts based on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic holy books, both exoteric and esoteric. Dee’s angelic work influenced the Golden Dawn, which sort of counts as pagan because the late 19th-century group added some (mostly Egyptian) gods and goddesses to the elaborate angelic names and calls, watchtowers, tablets, sigilla, and altar “furniture” the angels and demons gave Dee. (There are some nifty color plates of these things in the book.)

Many Witches and Pagans are interested in history, ceremonial magic, the occult world (which author Jason Louv calls “the occulture”) and its practices. These practices include operative magic, which Louv defines as applying the “intellectual streams” of the Renaissance to “uncover a working methodology for interacting with and manipulating the universe” (pp. 61-62) — i.e., pretty much what we do every day. If you’re attracted to the occult, this excellent book should be in your hands. It’s well written, insightful, sometimes witty, and thoroughly researched, with 60 pages of endnotes, bibliography, and index, plus numerous footnotes.

Louv, a writer and teacher of magick and spirituality, opens the book in the Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man. Next, comes the “sublunary world,” which is apparently the fallen world we live in. The stage is now set for Book 1, “The Magus,” which contains a biography of the frustrated and usually poverty-stricken Elizabethan mathematician, intellectual, astrologer/astronomer, and scientist John Dee (1527-1609), who spent much of his life aspiring to be an adviser to a queen or a king but with little success, mostly because the royal advisers considered him a quack. Also explained in the first seven chapters are the Christian interpretations of the Book of Revelation. Louv also asserts that Dee’s work set both England and America on their paths to empire.

Book II, “The Angelic Conversations,” tells us how to rise up along the paths of the Qabalistic Tree and how to prepare a proper altar for the angelic work. Louv trudges through the magical Books (which all have Latin names), Watchtowers, and Aethyrs. We also meet angels and demons and the god that inflicts suffering on us to teach us how to behave ourselves. There’s also some alchemy, but very little gold in the monetary sense. It’s all metaphorical gold.

Book III, “The Antichrist,” is mostly devoted to the life and works of Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, and other occultists who followed them in working (magically and with the help of drugs and lots of sex) to become as evil as possible so that they can become as holy as possible. Chapter 15, “The Invisible College,” introduces us to learned men from the 16th to the 21st century and describes the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons and Masons, the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), and the founding of the Golden Dawn. Chapter 16, “Crowned and Conquering,” is mostly about Crowley the 666 Beast and takes us in scrupulous — not to mention almost endless — detail through all thirty Aethyrs. These are visions and words of power. Chapter 17, “In the Shadow of the Cross,” introduces us to Crowley’s organization, the A..A.. and gives us more Golden Dawn, the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), and assorted people who wanted to meet Babalon, who is (to oversimplify) sexual Woman as the Supreme Evil.

Finally, Louv asserts that the work of John Dee initiated a line that reaches from the Reformation through 18th-century rationalism to the 20th century — hippies, the New Age, every strange and wonderful movement away from middle-class mores — and into the 21st century and the election of Donald Trump (really! See pp. 458-59). We’re in the middle of the modern Apocalypse now, and the last words in the book are “Christ is coming, and with him he shall bring an Empire of Angels.” (p. 462) The book, incidentally, was written in the City of Angels.